Well, it’s been a labor of love. Took me over 2 years and numerous restarts, but I finally completed my pet project of a kanji poster. I wanted this to really be a useful tool and in addition to looking nice on the wall. I hope the added katakana, hiragana, and radical lists are helpful to students and anyone learning Japanese.
About the poster:
The poster has the latest set of the 2136 Joyo kanji with common pronunciations, meanings, stroke count, and radical category. They are sorted by stroke count in each grade. Numbers 1 – 10 are listed first though. I had to clean up the pronunciations since there wasn’t enough room to put complete words like most Japanese dictionaries. That required me to go line by line through all 2136 kanji to fix it. Of course, this poster is not meant to substitute for a dictionary or reference source. Each kanji has most of the common onyomi and kunyomi pronuncations (vertical text) below and color coded. Kunyomi is in blue hiragana, and the onyomi is in a magenta katakana. Each grade level is color coded.
The poster was designed on a B0 paper size (1000 mm x 1414 mm) dimensions. I’m from America, but I realize a lot of people use metric sizes, so I set it for metric. However, PDF files can easily print to fit any sheet size by selecting that in the print option. I would recommend at least 42 inches wide and about 60 inches long. You could print this smaller, but readability will suffer some. It took a some design compromises to make sure all of this would fit correctly so this was about the best I could do. The margins are pretty tight, so make sure it’s printed with the Fit option in your PDF software. It may need to scale it slightly so nothing gets cut off.
How was this poster made? I used several programs. All of the kanji data was imported into Microsoft Excel and then into Access. I was able to set up a report inside of Microsoft Access that printed out 100 kanji per page where I was able to export those out a page at a time. The bottom footer portion was taken from Excel from the previous poster I was working on and tweaked from there. Everything was then brought into Adobe Illustrator and organized on the page.
This is a draft version. I proofed over it as much as possible, but I’m sure there may be an error here or there. I will upload corrected versions over time and hopefully improve on it. The poster comes in two font styles. A standard Kyoukasho (textbook) font and the UD Digi font (my personal preference). UD Digi is designed for easy readability.
What would I like to have included? I wish the kanji had the phonetic category for looking up in print dictionaries too like the radical category. I see that in a lot of children’s dictionaries from Japan.
The PDF file is free to download and print for any educational or personal use. Please feel free to share it too. It may not be sold or used for commercial reasons without permission though.
Feel free to download and check it out. There is an image preview so you can see what the poster looks like. Please chime in on your opinions. You can send this PDF to any office supply store or professional printer and have it printed yourself instead of having to order a pre-printed poster somewhere.
Enjoy!
Update: I added an A4 (Letter) size option to print this out in case you want to do this at home with some tape, glue, and scissors. I’ll probably go back and make a better version of this so it will print better.
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Poster PDF Download Link (Draft – May 6, 2023)
[Kanji Kana Radical Wall Poster PDF File – Kyoukasho Font](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zziATNcVZhEhl6LZLOu6vyatbqxZuT-p/view?usp=sharing)
Poster PDF Download Link (Draft – May 7, 2023)
[Kanji Kana Radical Wall Poster PDF File – UD Font](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lNzsKiwmfjDHl_gfBgQhPfuAQr-l44wj/view?usp=sharing)
Poster PDF Download Link (Draft – May 7, 2023)
[Kanji Kana Radical A4 Multi-Page PDF File](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozGjyMz4FNefb3L_BFwKUUevqDRtPWNf/view?usp=sharing)
Preview Image of the Full Poster (JPEG)
[Full Poster Preview Image](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_nsCx95GWm3N2ofq6AA5RYXMebmoV236/view?usp=sharing)
26 comments
This is very cool, thank you!
Very cool poster.
I might give a go at chopping this up so each block is US Letter or A4 size, so those of us who are too poor and/or cheap to have it professionally printed can just run it off in chunks on a regular inkjet and then tape it together.
びっくりした！
Thanks for all the work, I can’t imagine how long it must have taken.
Excellent. Thank you very much!
Do you have word docx file? Is it possible that can you share it?
Amazing, thank you.
Damn, that MUST have been a labor of love and a ton of work! Super cool, awesome resource. Thanks!
I will be using this, thank you for your good work OP
I’m very much a beginner and while I get what Kanji are and how they work, and only know a few, also I’m confused about how crazy this is. So much work! I thank you as a beginner and I love posters so, somehow this will go on my wall for sure. 🙏🫂
You are truly the GOAT. I’ve been looking for something like this since I started my journey. I was very surprised when I couldn’t find anything. This is exactly what I wanted.
Mate, that is great. Congrats on the hard work and thanks for sharing it for free.
I can’t believe you’ve done this. Thank you so much for sharing it!
My god
How much work this must’ve been
this is awesome, thank you so much
this is incredible job. thank you very much, it will be very useful ❤
MVP お疲れ様です!
Wow this is amazing, and super helpful.
thank you so much for this! so cool!
This is amazing- thanks for sharing!!
I’m amazed at your long dedication and hard work! You’re awesome!!
You’re a legend
Thanks for making this, just got back into learning again, this will be a great reference for me!
[Not quite a wall poster though](https://imgur.com/a/pQUvCB7)
If someone printed this in A0 format could you share how it looks like? And thanks OP for this.
As someone who is approaching the end of RTK, this is awesome! My few months work summarized on one page 🤣
It’s crazy what people can do with labor of love, the fact that you’ve done all this effort for free just for someone to learn something or be useful to someone is unbelievable.
I have a door that has been waiting for your poster. Thank you!